DZHOKHAR AND TAMERLANE

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a name like a science fiction story where the nations become planets and the oppressors are monsters.  Those writers always go to the Eurasian Turkish steppes for strange names with too many consonants.  It’s  a genre in which things are barely recognizable as versions of what we know except with a skew that makes us see everything differently.  I’m going to postpone the post I had and see what I can do with a nineteen-year-old boy who comes from war, carrying it within him, and follows his big brother into a world of death.

Since I knew so little about Chechnya, I had to spend a bit of time on research.  I started with the map, which is mountain country -- the Carpathians, second highest mountains in Europe.  It is like here in Valier if you live on the east side of them.  They are the wall that divides the Ukraine from Europe.

Then I look at the names of these two boys, one 26, a boxer, aggressive and abusive -- beating his wife got him a police record that prevented him from becoming a US citizen.  Then the other boy, only nineteen.  That’s two years older than my brothers when they enlisted in the Marines, the traditional age for soldiers.  He became a naturalized citizen through study and swearing allegiance to the USA.  Noxchi Mott is a language of these Carpathian mountain people.  Dzhokhar is proud to speak it well.  Not just Chechans, the tribe is defiant warriors, brutally conquered by unspeakable means right up until the present when Putin had a go at them.  This family tried emigration to the US, but were not happy here.  Dzhokhar seems the only one who really fit.  Tamerlan stayed to be the patriarch, a bully, even the home his fight arena.  Dzhokhar was young and flexible enough to assimilate a new world.  Tamerlan was not.  He remained at heart a mountain guerrilla.

Tamerlan is named for Tamerlane AKA Timur the Lame, who was a conquerer on the scale of Genghis Khan in the 1400’s.  “Timur's armies were feared throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe, sizable parts of which were laid to ruin by his campaigns.  Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population at the time.”   He was crippled by a shepherd’s arrow when he tried to steal a sheep and therefore earned his name. 

The name of Tamerlane is known to many of us because of a poem by Edgar Alan Poe.  “The main themes of "Tamerlane" are independence and pride as well as loss and exile.”

KIND solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme -
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell'd in -
I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope - that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
. . . .

Know thou the secret of a spirit
Bow'd from its wild pride into shame.
O! yearning heart! I did inherit
Thy withering portion with the fame,
The searing glory which hath shone
Amid the jewels of my throne,
Halo of Hell! and with a pain
Not Hell shall make me fear again -
O! craving heart, for the lost flowers
And sunshine of my summer hours!
Th' undying voice of that dead time,
With its interminable chime,
Rings, in the spirit of a spell,
Upon thy emptiness - a knell.

. . .

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

So late from Heaven - that dew - it fell
(Mid dreams of an unholy night)
Upon me - with the touch of Hell,
While the red flashing of the light
From clouds that hung, like banners, o'er,
Appeared to my half-closing eye
The pageantry of monarchy,
And the deep trumpet-thunder's roar
Came hurriedly upon me, telling
Of human battle, where my voice,
My own voice, silly child! - was swelling
(O! how my spirit would rejoice,
And leap within me at the cry)
The battle-cry of Victory!

. . .

My passions, from that hapless hour,
Usurp'd a tyranny which men
Have deem'd, since I have reach'd to power;
My innate nature - be it so:

I reach'd my home - my home no more -
For all had flown who made it so -

. . .

Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair?

This is grandiosity and narcissism and the romanticizing of bloody hell.  We love it as much as the Carpathians do, though they probably have more words for it.  A mixture of the essential nature of the testosterone-governed male body, the love of one’s family, determination to make the tribe survive, rejection of all authorities, resorting to force instead of persuasion -- forever maimed by pride.  What makes us think that a diaspora can work if, based on such forces, it forms hard secret cadres in the heart of the larger unknowing nation?  What a great source of drama full of seduction and tragedy -- this story will persist, elaborate, morph with the times.  

But the truth is somewhat different:  a gentle boy with tangled hair bleeding to death in some middle-class American’s boat, firing back bravely from under a winter shrink-wrap, while a helicopter infrared camera illuminates his green, still-warm body and robots trundle up the driveway to sniff for bombs and to potentially tip the boat over, dumping him out on the cement. This is not the combat of warriors.

But then, the bombs were coward’s attacks on families and happy citizens, shredding their legs and killing their children.  Only a madman could think this was anything approaching combat.  The real pressure cooker was in their Chechen heads, mixing shrapnel of medieval war and modern subjugation into identity-destruction.  They have done their cause grievous harm.

Thinking about the research on brain trauma from boxing, which was Tamerlan’s success until he suddenly gave it up, I suggested to a friend that they should carefully autopsy his brain.  But the friend, who is a skilled cruiser of the dark parts of the Internet, reported that his brain was probably too destroyed by bullets to be interpretable.  The last small value of his body has been lost to violence.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a wrestler rather than a boxer.  His brain was not damaged, but his identity was at least double -- maybe more.  In one role he followed Tamerlan into Hell.  In the other he was a good student, a quiet friend to both male and female, a lifeguard.  Islam was his “world-view” he said.  His nationality was split between the old country, which he still visited, and his new one.

I imagine him lying in the bottom of a boat, the dregs, remembering the thump of running over his dying brother, and what else?  Which identity lay there in a pool of blood?  It could not have felt triumphant.  My guess is that he felt nothing, totally dissociated from thought, until the police found him and the last firefight was underway.  By then he could only find himself in confrontation, adversaries, the hypoxic heights of imagined heroism.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.